Letter from Manfred Storn

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 19

I am a teacher in a secondary school (Hauptschule) in Germany and have been taking computer lessons since 1982.

I first met APL 3 years ago, by accident, while looking for a programming language - something like COMAL on an Atari ST. I tried C and Modula 2, saw MicroAPL and bought it. Usually I get I-APL or TRY-APL for my pupils to effect the first interest for APL which can be handled more or less by intuition and interactive work. Why write pages of code if there is APL available?

We can get a pretty good German translation of Garry Helzer’s manual at a low price, so that everybody can afford it. But I have a lot of difficulties writing complete programs which can be handled by anyone. In most of the literature there are lots of tricky or highly mathematical functions. But what I need are simple menu-structured useful programs.

At the moment the Education Vector seems the only script which can be used in secondary schools without any further adaptation. The programming code is short enough to put it into the computer without getting square eyes!

As a member of the APL-Club in Germany I get the APL-journal, but it isn’t meant to be used for introducing APL to pupils. So I have to translate some parts of the Education Vector.

Just a little information about my school: it has 260 pupils in the age range 10-17. Most still use computer C-64 (even at school); there are very few pc’s, but a lot of Amigas (for games!) and some Atari STs. Languages preferred are PL-COMAL and German LOGO for the beginner. At the moment there is a trend to let the programs remain as black boxes.